Beaker's Dozen - Hardcover

Kress, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312865376 ISBN 13: 9780312865375

Publisher: Tor Books, 1998

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Maximum Light and Beggars Ride offers a collection of her finest science fiction stories of the 1990s, including the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella "Beggars in Spain." 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Although you can't judge a book by its cover, sometimes you can make a few good guesses about it based on the title. This is definitely true of Beaker's Dozen, a collection of short stories by renowned SF author Nancy Kress, who writes, "Of the thirteen stories in this book, eight are concerned with what might come out of the beakers and test tubes and gene sequencers of microbiology." What modesty prohibits Kress from adding is that all of the stories are excellent works by one of SF's finest writers. The highlights here are Kress's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning story "Beggars in Spain" (later expanded into an acclaimed novel of the same name), and the Nebula Award-winning story "The Flowers of Aulit Prison." --Craig E. Engler

From the Back Cover:

"The twenty-first century, it's often remarked, will transform our knowledge of biology, in the same way that the twentieth century transformed physics. With knowledge, of course, comes application. And with the application of all we are learning about genetic engineering come social and ethical questions, some of them knotty.

"This is where science fiction enters, stage left. Scientific laboratories are where the new technologies are rehearsed. Science fiction rehearses the implications of those technologies. What might we eventually do with our new-found power? Should we do it? Who should do it? Who will be affected? How? Is that a good thing or not? For whom?

"Of the thirteen stories in this book, eight of them are concerned with what might come out of the beakers and test tubes and gene sequencers of microbiology. Not everything in these stories will come to pass. Possibly nothing in them will; fiction is not prediction. But I hope the stories at least raise questions about the world rushing in on us at the speed--not of light--but of thought."

-Nancy Kress from her introduction

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312865376
• ISBN 13: 9780312865375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352